The cooling system has been modified and now uses more of the system chassis to assist with cooling. This is likely why the Core-i5 is able to now be fanless (in addition to using Kaby Lake). Should mean the fan has to ramp up less in the higher models as well.

Legend

I'm confident it will still be a hot mess of throttling with any continuous CPU + GPU activity though. The problem with the S4 is it throttles once the "skin" reaches about 40C and the "skin" is also a part of the cooling system with these. Tablet design considerations.

Veteran

I'm confident it will still be a hot mess of throttling with any continuous CPU + GPU activity though. The problem with the S4 is it throttles once the "skin" reaches about 40C and the "skin" is also a part of the cooling system with these. Tablet design considerations.

Legend

The Acer Switch Alpha 12 is completely passively cooled and performance is similar (often slightly higher) to the actively cooled Surface Pro 4 when looking at comparable i5 (Skylake) models.

The Acer Switch got up to ~100 degrees Fahrenheit (~37.8 degrees Celsius) in one review I was reading while the Surface Pro 4 only got up to ~90 degress Fahrenheit (~32.2 degrees Celsius) for the rear casing of the tablet. Also factor in that the Acer was using a much brighter and thus hotter LCD.

The main difference was that Acer's passive system used liquid cooling to spread the heat more evenly across the surface of the device. The Surface Pro 4 concentrates most of the heat onto one corner of the device. Again, using the i5 Skylake CPU.

The new Surface Pro is not only using a slightly cooler CPU, but it's also more effectively spreading the heat across more of the tablet's case. I'm not so sure it's going to be as bad as some people think. Especially if Microsoft were to allow the shell to get a little warmer.

ModeratorLegend

The new Surface Pro is not only using a slightly cooler CPU, but it's also more effectively spreading the heat across more of the tablet's case. I'm not so sure it's going to be as bad as some people think. Especially if Microsoft were to allow the shell to get a little warmer.

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It not the 'as bad as people think' so much as the 'its not going to be as good as some think' which is being addressed. You cannot have an i5 passively cooled in a tiny case and not throttle at all. A large heat-sink at the back can only deal with so much heat.

A proper engineer who knows the maths (@MrFox?) could actually calculate heat dissipation from the rear heatsink, but a little common sense seems conclusive to me - the surface area of the back of the SP4 is 59,000 mm^2. The surface area of a HS is way more than that (this one is ~150,000 mm^2 quick calculation) yet it still needs airflow. There's just no way SP5 will be 100% performance all the time passively cooled (unless it's clocked way down). What we'll almost certainly have is SP4's performance, same thermal profile and throttling, only with silent operation and no fan kicking in.

Legend

That's why I was skeptical of the Surface Pro concept, because in tablet mode, it's thicker and had fans.

It would make sense if you save money with a Surface Pro over getting a laptop and a separate tablet but that really isn't the case.

They've certainly carved out a good niche though.

There is an Acer 2 in 1 with Ferrari branding which has a detachable tablet from a solid keyboard base. It is kind of like the Surface Book in that in clamshell mode, you can change the angle of the screen just like a clamshell. But this thing is like $2400 or $2500.

Again, at that kind of pricing, you can get a nice ultrabook and a nice tablet.

Legend

It not the 'as bad as people think' so much as the 'its not going to be as good as some think' which is being addressed. You cannot have an i5 passively cooled in a tiny case and not throttle at all. A large heat-sink at the back can only deal with so much heat.

A proper engineer who knows the maths (@MrFox?) could actually calculate heat dissipation from the rear heatsink, but a little common sense seems conclusive to me - the surface area of the back of the SP4 is 59,000 mm^2. The surface area of a HS is way more than that (this one is ~150,000 mm^2 quick calculation) yet it still needs airflow. There's just no way SP5 will be 100% performance all the time passively cooled (unless it's clocked way down). What we'll almost certainly have is SP4's performance, same thermal profile and throttling, only with silent operation and no fan kicking in.

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That cooler is meant to be able to cool down CPUs that consume at least 130 watts of power. The Surface Pro only has to dissipate ~15 watts of power. That's almost a magnitude more of heat generation that the desktop cooler needs to cool.

LegendVeteranSubscriber

We'll need to see a teardown of the new Surface Pro before jumping to conclusions.
The SP4 Core m3 has just empty space in the place where the fan would be in the actively cooled models. It's possible the new Surface Pro doesn't have any empty space in the fanless models and uses the fan space to put more copper fins and heatpipes, and that's enough to cool the new Kaby Lake i5.

I'm more interested in knowing how the new Spectre X2 with dual-fans will behave, though.

Acer Switch Alpha?
That heatpipe + liquidloop combo seems to work really well. Reportedly, their Core i5 tops 60ºC running Prime95 for long periods of time, but I'd like to see results running games instead as the iGPU is probably more thermally demanding.

Yup.
It's a matter of opinion if it qualifies as good.
It's a bit of a pity that only the i7 model was tested. Since the SoC divides the thermal headroom between the CPU and the GPU, the behaviour with the more modest GPU would have been different, to an unknown extent. Would have been interesting to see.

LegendVeteranSubscriber

Notebookcheck's reviews and comparisons on the several Surface Pro 4 models were great. I think we'll see the real differences between the SP4's i7 and 2017 SP's i7 when they release their reveal.

Regardless, it looks like the new Surface Pro i7 sustains 1.4GHz CPU + ~800MHz GPU during long periods of gaming time, which IIRC are a lot better than the i7's sustained clocks in SP4. That's a 650 GFLOPs GPU in a tablet.

LegendVeteranSubscriber

It looks like the new i7 Surface Pro with Kaby Lake has a much more effective cooling solution. The iGPU manages to sustain almost 30% higher clocks across the board than the SP4 Skylake version, and gets around 25% better gaming performance overall:

Legend

It looks like the new i7 Surface Pro with Kaby Lake has a much more effective cooling solution. The iGPU manages to sustain almost 30% higher clocks across the board than the SP4 Skylake version, and gets around 25% better gaming performance overall:

Click to expand...

Also notable that it does so with a lower and less aggressive fan profile as well. IIRC, steady state heat dissipation for the CPU package from that video allowed for 12 watts for the SP4 and 16 watts for the new SP.

It also took significantly longer before they cooling system reached that steady state. This is due mostly to using more of the chassis to absorb and dissipate heat.

For gaming it's obviously going to throttle a lot as the steady state heat dissipation is going suffer without a fan. However, the revised cooling solution which uses more of the chassis will allow for far longer periods of burst performance.

That said, the i5 will also generate a lot less heat than the i7 as it has not only a weaker CPU but also a much weaker GPU. In non-gaming scenarios that don't stress the GPU, I imagine it might operate quite well with limited or no throttling.

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